When I first read On Beauty, I was twenty-two years old. I had just started my first semester of my Master’s program at Columbia University, fresh off of a year spent in Gaborone, Botswana. We had little WiFi and vast stretches of time, during which I could either watch the hours of illicit, campy television I had backlogged on my USB drive, or I could read. When I did the latter, it made me feel a little less anxious about the MFA program I had been accepted to, the dozen or so others I had applied to in an effort to spend less money to attend.

I read Donna Tartt, Haruki Murakami, Toni Morrison, and Zadie Smith. I loved them all but none like Smith. It had been that way since I finished White Teeth, a few summers prior in France. A similar situation, minimal WiFi and long swathes of time set in front of me.

But it took me until the MFA to read On Beauty. I ended up in the expensive one. 

Living in New York brought me many different things–an inferiority complex about my own writing, and a newfound superiority complex about my own sense of self, if I managed my body correctly. I was embarrassing myself over a white boy over six feet (first of his name, albeit not the last), while drinking and singing karaoke at bars in Morningside Heights. I had a raging eating disorder, far more tasteful and sustainable (it seemed to me) than the bulimia and restrictive calorie counting I had maintained throughout my undergraduate years. Now I divided my time up into two periods–fasting days, and feeding days. On a fasting day, Monday or Thursday, I would eat a certain, minute caloric quantity. On a feeding day, I could eat what I wanted.

I can’t remember whether my class, The Campus Novel, met on a fasting or a feeding day. I do remember reading On Beauty with the same fervor with which I read all books that semester, not only as if they could teach me something new, but also as if I was in steep competition with my classmates to know the most, to learn the best. My professor had grown up in the same area as Smith, in Northwest London. He was good-tempered about not being as famous as her, which was more than I could say for many of the professors in that department. 

It’s been nearly six years to the day since I took that class. This year, in an attempt to distract myself from the long swathes of empty, anxious time that is the agent submission process, I returned to On Beauty. I had written my own campus novel in the intervening years, lovingly and cheekingly stealing the name Wellington, the university at which On Beauty takes place, for my own. I was writing towards Zadie Smith, as she wrote to E.M. Forster, I had convinced myself. In the ensuing years the details of On Beauty had left me, but it was the soul of what it was which I borrowed. What I remembered: A biracial family suffering a cold Northeast Winter. Layers of betrayal taking place on a beautiful, manicured campus. Infidelity and morality at odds with the anxiety of liberalism. More than enough to work with.

There was much, however, that I had forgotten. Primarily, the layers of betrayal undergone by the Black women at the center and at the margins of On Beauty. Kiki Belsey, whose husband Howard Belsey embarks on an affair with his white colleague, is the novel’s tragic heroine. Where her children are individually odious and her husband is clearly at fault, Kiki tries to befriend the wife of her husband’s academic rival, Carlene Kipps, while also attempting to come to terms with her husband’s deep betrayal. Kiki is also a fat Black woman, and her character is drawn primarily through the contours of her body.

An early scene: Kiki is at the marketplace. The close third narration (a real talent of Smith’s is her ability to weave seamlessly between omniscient third, close third and free indirect speech) poses, “The size was sexual and at the same time more than sexual…if she were white, maybe it would only refer to sex, but she was not. And so her chest gave off a mass of signals beyond her direct control: sassy, sisterly, predatory, motherly, threatening, comforting.” The dissection and summation of Kiki’s breasts puts her fatness and Blackness at once on display, similar to the merchant’s goods for sale. In the same scene, she acknowledges the ways in which the intersection of these two things also offers her up for ridicule, remarking, “I’m the Aunt Jemima on the cookie boxes of their childhoods, the pair of thick ankles Tom and Jerry played around.” That is not to say that Kiki cannot be described as beautiful. Even the novel’s declarative beauty Victoria Kipps describes her as, “very beautiful…like an African queen.” 

Despite the direct way Kiki is able to be in conversation with her body, it is Carlene Kipps, the novel’s other wronged wife, who makes the frank declaration on women’s relationship to their bodies, saying, “Everything I do I do with my body. Even my soul is made up of raw meat, flesh. Truth is in a face as much as it is anywhere. We women know that faces are full of meaning, I think… Men have the gift of pretending that’s not true. And this is where the power comes from. [My husband] hardly knows he has a body at all.” Like Kiki, the reader also finds it hard not to take Carlene at her word. She is, after all, the ghostly, Cassandra-esque figure whose death bestows Kiki with the ultimate beautiful gift, an expensive, perhaps ill-begotten Haitian painting and way to leave her cheating husband and fairweather children behind. 

Through Kiki and Carlene’s embodied discussion we might come closer to achieving some kind of answer as to what Smith herself might think about women’s bodies (if we can avoid the textual anarchy that Howard Belsey himself is a fan of). One woman wants to be seen for her intellect, even as we have seen her positioned and framed through bodily orientation. The other character, with scarcely a pause, lets her know that this is not possible.

The burden of all contemporary writers is, of course, the tendency of the reader to project intention onto the writer, not merely as relates to the ideas they want to get across within the novel, but as to their own personal beliefs and tastes. I fall into the trap myself, no matter how I try to tell my family and friends that the characters I write are not me, but a fictive quality of my own imagination. Neither family, friends, nor I really believe what I am saying to be true. The elephant in the room is this–Zadie Smith the writer is a beautiful woman, the ethereal kind of beauty which everyone can agree on–light-skinned, willowy, artfully styled and elegant. 

On the phone with my mother, herself closer to a Zadie-type than a Kiki-type, I raise my feelings of discomfort as to the way that Smith writes her fat characters. “Maybe she was close enough to people who were overweight to be able to access that perspective,” my mother says, diplomatically, “And also, it speaks to that question of what people can write about. Even very skinny people have body image issues, you know.”

I do know, and yet I don’t. I try to contextualize my feelings in the character I feel the closest to, and thus the most repelled by–Zora, the Belsey’s only daughter. Zora: performing the mental calculus of whether the caloric output of the exercise she completed was sufficient to outweigh that of the food ingested. Zora: forthright, headstrong, booksmart, perhaps not inherently talented, but of the belief that anything she could be great at anything she set her mind to. 

There are traits anyone would admire in Zora–her ability to command a room, her bullish pursuit of justice, and those anyone would condemn–her arch attempt at defending her father’s choice to cheat on her mother, her half-white saviour-esque attempts to keep Carl Thomas, street poet-to “poet poet”– in Claire Malcolm’s classroom, demanding his affection in turn. If Kiki is the novel’s “good” character, rewarded by escaping the tangled nest of the Belsey family, an extension of the oppressive nature of Wellington, then Zora is only partially redeemed. She holds the secrets of her father and Monty Kipps’ infidelities to her chest, siding with her mother only at the very end of the novel.

Smith inhabits the perspectives of all of her characters fully, but there is something alienating in the way in which she intervenes in the bodies of her fat characters. There is something luscious, exotic in the way Kiki’s breasts are described, a moment of glee in which Levi, Zora’s younger brother, makes a throwaway comment as to her “lumpy body.” There is vulnerability, too, in the way Kiki holds her stomach out of the way when fucking her husband from on top, Carl’s desperate attempts at Zora’s approval even as he compares her looks to Victoria Kipps’, finding them lacking.

Considering beauty and my own lifelong struggle with body image issues and disordered eating, I can’t help but remember those moments when I felt disgust was described, and when I felt that disgust land in my own body. It was no wonder that I had named the college of my novel Wellington, while also conveniently forgetting the plot events of On Beauty itself (more likely than not, our class met on a fasting day). I was doing everything possible to separate the Zora on the page from the Zora in my mind, even as I wrote with and against her in my own novel.

The spectrum of beauty is vast, and it is fickle. Racial capitalism serves as the insidious underpinning of Western beauty standards. There can be no doubt that Black women are held to these standards, even if they were never meant to accommodate us. Desirable traits, thinness, fair-skinnedness, “good” hair–in their varying permutations and hierarchical positionings can or cannot add up to make a so-called beautiful person. There have been countless thinkpieces, twitter threads and TikTok videos discussing whether or not small, up-turned noses with thin bridges can be said to be “eurocentric,” or whether Black people can lay claim to that physical feature. The beauty wars are as active as the twitter Diaspora wars and it’s messy down here. That’s before entering the divisive politics of what kind of hair a Black woman can wear and still be considered appropriate, neat, tidy, all of the other unspoken qualities that mark acceptability and respectability in the workplace, in the home, in society at large. You would be hard pressed to find someone who would look at a Zadie-type–thin, attractive, well-manicured and dressed–and not know that she was beautiful.

We can intellectualize and pick at the existence of beauty standards all we want, and yet beauty does exist.

With Zoras and Kikis, on the other hand, there can be more debate. Fatphobia in particular complicates and intersects even intentionally pro-Black conversations about beauty. Can a Zadie-type ever really understand this? 

Another argument, one put forward by Terese Mailhot, writer and Professor at Purdue University, takes the other side. Mailhot tweets, “What could a literary non-hottie know about the exploitation of femme, highly sexualized women–women who look and act like Oates have no compassion or love for women like Marilyn. They’re just as bad as men at writing them.” Naturally there are issues in considering Oates’ treatment of Monroe–the fact that Marilyn Monroe is both a cultural icon and a real person is one, Oates’ age and literary success is another. I certainly can not claim to be Joyce Carol Oates (although she did serve as an instructor of mine), yet Mailhot’s tweet cut me deeply. I am a self-designated Zora type who has never considered herself to be particularly beautiful. 

Will I be doomed to exploit and misuse beauty even as I crave it for my own?  

If a Zora-type has the capacity to misuse beauty, then we might look to a Zadie type to be better able to portray the ways in which people have the capacity to exploit the beautiful among us. Smith does indeed provide us with such a figure–the college-aged Victoria Kipps, known for her gorgeous face and her perfectly proportioned slim-thick body. Vee (Victoria’s cool-girl moniker) is sexually involved with the novel’s three men–the younger Belsey, Jerome, his middle-aged father and her Professor, and Zora’s unrequited love interest, the aforementioned Carl Thomas. Only Jerome professes to love Victoria, but even he, like the other two, doesn't understand her. Vee pleads to Howard, “You don’t know me…This [she…touched her face, her breasts, her hips] that’s what you know.” She’s right to say it: Howard doesn’t know her, but neither do we. On Beauty makes it clear that beauty corrupts, as does man’s longing for it. What that has to do with the women Howard tosses aside–Claire Malcolm, his age appropriate affair-partner and Victoria Kipps, his much younger one, Chantelle Williams– the woman who asks for a voice in the form of Monty Kipps and is denied–Kiki and Zora, is not answered.

I suppose it is not on Smith to be able to redeem how the intersections of racial capitalism, white supremacy and aestheticized norms shape our definitions of beauty, and the lengths willing to acknowledge, capture and possess those norms. Perhaps it is merely enough that she identifies it on the page.

When I look at Smith, however, in her elegantly wrapped head scarfs and over-sized black clothing shielding that skinny body, I wonder what such a redemptive narrative might look like. Romance novelists like Talia Hibbert and Jasmine Guillory have proven more capable than literary writers of presenting the full lives of fat Black women, whether they are Zoras, Kikis, or otherwise.

In mainstream media, one of the staunchest proponents of Black women on screen has been Issa Rae. I’m a longstanding fan of Rae’s–I watched Awkward Black Girl when it was a web series on YouTube, and eagerly followed Insecure’s run on HBO. While I was deeply invested in the complex, layered friendships, romantic relationships, and familial dynamics in Insecure, I also remember Hunter Harris’ Vulture article where she describes Rae’s glow-up between Season 1 and Season 2. Harris highlights Issa Rae’s (and thus also, her stand-in Issa Dee’s) Season 2 use of form-fitting fabrics, newly employed exercise regimes and improved skin-care and make-up applications. I noticed her smaller, skinnier body.

But I remain a fan of Insecure and of Rae’s. I knew I would be watching Rap Sh!t, the new HBOMax series for which she serves as creator, executive producer, and writer. And as I watched, I was pleasantly surprised to see Zora-type and Kiki-types abound on screen. The two leads, Shawn (Aida Osman) and Mia (KaMillion), meet with their to-be manager, the thin, masc lesbian Chastity, the self-proclaimed “Duke of Miami” (Jonica Booth), in order to brainstorm a plan for the duo’s single release. Duke exclaims, “Man, I know y'all hоеs starving y'all thick asses off, I got some shrimp, snapper, lobster... Broccoli if y'all trying to be healthy.” Throughout the run of the show, no other comment is made about the size of the two leads, whether to discuss weight they had gained, lost, or felt self-conscious about. In a particularly evocative scene, Shawna sends a nude video to her on-again, off-again boyfriend. Her body is on display, shot beautifully by director Lawrence Lamont, and there are no attempts to cover her rounded stomach, the cellulite on her thighs.

Shawna –a conscious rapper who wants to be known for more than her body, who attended an elite university only to have to start again from scratch from her hometown in Miami– is a Zora-type if there ever was one. Her character comes into her sexuality, beautifully, flirting with high-profile rappers and starting an affair with one of her co-workers, Maurice (Daniel Augustin). (Rap Sh!t’s directors are also stunningly capable of portraying male beauty on screen, episode 6, shot by Amy Aniobi, shows Augustin’s character in glistening, muscled glory, Shawna speaks for an audience of appreciative Black women, myself included, when she teases him, saying, “Why are you so buff?”).

Maybe the question is not whether a Zadie-type can write a Zora-type, an Issa a Shawna, or whether a “beautiful” woman can fully inhabit the lived experience of plainness, but whether a Zora-type can exist in the world on her own terms, in her own body, in this fatphobic, white supremacist world. “Beauty” forms the foundation on which our world is structured, yes. But we are more than our malnourished bodies, our vicious attempts at conforming to these unequal, undeserving standards.